From housekeeper to hero. From domestic to dignitary. Rosa Parks was many things in her life, but she wasn't tired.
The romanticized version of her story is that when Parks refused to give up her seat on that Alabama bus, it was a single act of defiance by a poor-but-proud seamstress too exhausted from her hard day's work to get up and move to the "colored" section in the back.
But the real story is that Rosa Park's bold actions on Dec. 1, 1955, and the yearlong bus boycott that ensued were part of a carefully orchestrated plan that was years in the making. Community leaders had been planning a bus boycott, and they were waiting for just the right person to give the movement momentum.
Enter Parks, a well-respected woman with a spotless record who was a former secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP.
It's not certain whether Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat on the bus was planned for that day, or whether years of civil rights work spontaneously burst forth in a shining movement of bravery.
But what is certain is that the people in Parks' community created an environment that allowed her to come forward, and their well-organized actions immediately following her arrest leveraged her courageous stand.
As human beings we all want to believe one person can make a difference, and Rosa Parks certainly did. Her actions that day in Montgomery helped unleash the civil rights movement.
But did Rosa launch the movement? Or did the movement actually launch Rosa?
The truth is, the hero doesn't create the environment; the environment creates the hero. And believe it or not, the prospects for future heroes are actually looking pretty good these days.
My daughter's first-grade class was studying the civil rights movement, and I happened to be volunteering one day when they were discussing Martin Luther King Jr. As I sat in the back stapling construction paper birds to a huge poster of blue sky, her teacher read a story about King as a young boy, told from the vantage point of his sister.
As the teacher described King's pain when the white boys he had befriended told him their dad had forbidden them to play with him anymore, the class was stunned.
As the teacher went on to explain that blacks and whites used to go to separate schools, the kids were just amazed.
"How weird," they chimed. "Why would you divide people up like that?"
As they pondered the absurdity of this bizarre system they held out their arms, side by side, trying to decide who would go to the white school and who would go to the black one. Their little spindly 6-year-old arms varied in color from dark brown to pale alabaster.
Would the girl from the Philippines with yellowish skin go the white school or the black one? What about the boy from Mexico, whose skin was light tan? And then there was the black child with the white mother. If she went to the black school, would they let her mother in to pick her up?
It never even dawned on them that one school might be perceived as "better" than the other.
When the teacher told them there was a time when blacks couldn't vote, the kids wondered, "Did they have their own president?"
As I looked at my little blue-eyed, blond daughter standing there with her class, unable to even fathom these incomprehensible social barriers, I realized just how far we had come.
Her father, my husband, was raised in the Deep South. Born just one year before Rosa refused to move to the back, he went to segregated schools, his family had black maids who got a new uniform for Christmas and whenever the yard help came to the back door for a drink, everyone knew you gave them a Mason jar because heaven forbid black lips touch a glass that your white family might later drink from.
Yet one generation later his child sits next to a boy from Nigeria, befuddled by the idea that anyone would view them as anything but a pair of 6 year olds who like to draw.
Was my husband a rabble-rouser who fought against the indignities of his childhood? No. He simply grew up. And as the world changed, so did he.
Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does."
The heroes of tomorrow are being created in environment of today. And you don't be a Rosa Parks to do your part. All you have to do is decide that you're not too tired to take a stand.
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